How to Plan Out Practices

by | Dec 25, 2021 | Blog, Cheer Training

cheer practice planning

Photo: Snapped! by Becca Clark

Coaches, this article is for you! Practice planning can be a struggle sometimes. It’s difficult to figure out how to best prioritize training time to make sure your team reaches their goals. On top of that, you may feel pressure to keep things interesting or maintain your team’s motivation throughout the season.

Here’s a breakdown of how to plan your practices each week, specifically how to determine what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it and what kinds of things you’re going to include based on the time of year:

1. Figure out your goals

The first thing to do is figure out the goals you have for your team for the year, the month, the week and the practice day itself. This will be a range of big to small goals, with the bigger goals being the month-long or year-long ones, and the smaller goals being the daily or weekly ones. I encourage you to talk with your team about this to see what their goals are and where they think they’re headed (or want to be headed).

2. Determine what can be done to achieve each goal

Once you have your list of goals written down, you need to figure out how to incorporate them into practice. If a goal is to improve endurance, make sure you spend time each practice training that. If you want your team to be able to stick their tumbling better, spend some time on take-off and landing drills. Overall, just identify the goals you/your team has and what specific things you/your team needs to do to reach the goals.

3. List out the basics

Next, you’re going to list out all the other basics that you need to do every practice. This includes things like warm up, tumbling foundations (straight jumps, rolls, cartwheels, etc.), and potentially conditioning or flexibility training. Basically, identify all the essentials that you would every single practice no matter what time of year it is.

4. Do a breakdown of time

With all the essentials from step #3, plus the specific things from step #2 to reach the goals from step #1, figure out approximately how long all these are going to take and make sure you can fit them into the allotted practice time. Some things can overlap and be included in existing components, like the endurance work you may want to do can be included in the conditioning.

Here’s an example of a 2-hour practice:

  • Warm-Up – 10 minutes
  • Tumbling Foundations – 15 minutes
  • Conditioning – 20 minutes
  • Flexibility Training – 15 minutes
  • Goal-Specific Training (ex: landing drills) – 10 minutes

Now, you need to see how much time you have left. The total of warm up, tumbling foundations, conditioning, flexibility training and landing drills, as listed above, is 1 hour and 10 minutes. This leaves you with 50 minutes to do other things. So, you could spend 20 minutes on stunting, 20 minutes on tumbling skills and 10 minutes on choreography/routine cleaning.

The time that’s left over should basically be focused on the goals for the near future, while the things that you chose to do every single practice will be what helps you reach the longer-term goals for the year.

Obviously, you don’t have to follow this exact structure, I just created a random example off the top of my head. Your team may be really strong at tumbling and not need to spend time every single day working on it, so that 20 minutes allotted to tumbling could be spent on things that your team needs to work on more, like strength training, flexibility or choreography.

Also, depending on the time of year, different things will be the priority. As you get closer to competition, spend less time on conditioning, stretching and learning new skills, but spend more time on doing full outs and cleaning up your routine. On the other hand, in the summer, you can completely remove the routine/choreo stuff from practice and spend tons more time conditioning, stretching and learning new skills for the upcoming season.

5. Order the sections

Once you’ve figured out each little section that you want to include in practice, you’ll need to order them in the most logical way. For the example I used above, I would put things in the following order:

  1. Warm-Up – 10 minutes
  2. Tumbling Foundations – 15 minutes
  3. Take-Off & Landing Drills – 10 minutes
  4. Tumbling Skills – 20 minutes
  5. Stunting – 20 minutes
  6. Conditioning – 20 minutes
  7. Flexibility Training – 15 minutes
  8. Routine Cleaning/Choreography – 10 minutes

I decided to put tumbling foundations second because it’s sort of like an extended warm up – it gets athletes’ bodies moving and includes coordination exercises. After that, I added in the tumbling/goal-specific drills since they build off of the tumbling foundations. Then, I continued on with the same theme of tumbling and put tumbling skills at number 4. This way, athletes can work on their individual skills or routine passes and already be pretty warmed up from the previous sections.

Conditioning was placed 6th but this could also be done immediately after warm up. Placement of this section would depend on how much conditioning you plan to do and/or how tired you want your athletes to be while tumbling, stunting, etc.

Ideally, flexibility training should be done near the end of practice because it’s best to stretch when you’re at your warmest. I’d avoid doing this at the start, unless your warm up is really good.

Lastly, I put routine cleaning and choreography at the end because it generally doesn’t require a whole lot of movement, especially if you’re just marking the routine. Athletes can use this as a cool down as well.